Gorgeous clear blue skies and bright sun today, ready for the temperature drop. Quite refreshing.
Status:
Mostly pottering today, cleaning and I guess sort of getting ready for the winter, now the temperature has finally decided to drop closer to zero. Made sure the rabbit’s little heater is switched on – their coats do most of the work but this keeps a section of their home just above zero, like it would be at the bottom of a burrow.
Thinking more about the chat I had with my friend yesterday about his possible chronic fatigue and how, in hindsight, it was a fairly positive experience for me. It’s very easy to get depressed about CFS – it can feel like my life as I lived it is over never to return, and there’s a significant amount of mourning to be done – but there are things to be optimistic about. My mental state has improved over the last year and I am managing things more steadily with fewer bad crashes. I’m still functionally disabled and can’t do more than an hour or so of activity every couple of days, but I have help, I have advice and there’s a glimmer of light at the end.
Explaining this to someone who’s maybe at the stage I was a year ago also meant explaining it to myself, and I need that once in a while.
Overnight listening:
- In Our Time - Antigone - turns out it’s pronounced Anne-Tig-On-Ee (as opposed to a spray for bringing things back).
Music:
- Client - moving up the years to more recent recordings. Still great.
Reading:
- Silos for Sunshine: we’ve mastered harvesting the sun, but storage is the gamechanger - looking at electricity as an perishable good and then what humanity’s solutions for storing perishables in the past (refrigeration, etc) can tell us about a future when we have an abundance of energy storage.
- Russell Tovey on pride, sexual power and politics: ‘The Green party slogan – make hope normal again – is what we need’ - “Things are fucking rocky [so let’s] build more lighthouses and be that fucking light that shines out, so people can find you through this dark, cold water that we’re being plunged into."
- Bimbling by Bike: A Spanish Introduction (Bec) and Good cop, bad cop (Sam). My friends Sam and Bec are currently cycling through Spain as part of their very long slow cycle trip and have been documenting it in a delightful way, highly reminiscent of old-school blogging or journaling. This is a lovely pair of posts by both of them.
Watching:
Jigsaws completed:
- Badge collection - always good to do other people’s jigsaws once in a while.
Telly:
- Tuca & Bertie - I’m nearing the end and it’s getting nice and weird.
- Two Errol Morris documentaries:
- The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography - very different to the usual photography doc. Quite touching and sweet with a lot of depth.
- The Pigeon Tunnel - a more classic Morris interview with John LeCarre, which I enjoyed but found surprisingly slight.